Commendation SOM Foundation UK Award
The project explores how inward reflection and collective experience can influence architecture.
An initial study of Tracey Emin's artworks led to an understanding of reflection as an individual experience.
The resulting work investigates ways reflections can be used to create personal moments in the city.
An intermediate stage of development uses mirrors in a public exhibition structure in Piccadilly Circus to give unique views of displayed objects. The viewing is personal, yet shared with many other people.
The end project, a retreat for stressed workers with publicly accessible landscape space, gives opportunities for reflection, both individual and collective.
Everyday, Everything – here and now’ was the title of the unit. The working process was initiated by an investigation of Young British Artists reacting to the everyday.
Through rigorous research, parallel investigation and interpretation with models and drawings, this project was able to develop a coherent result throughout the different stages.
Using the theme of reflection, his project interpreted our relation to the everyday as a reflection, used the optical potential of reflective surfaces to design an exhibition in the sky floating over Piccadilly Circus, and finally developed and extended these ideas into a building. Structured around a memorial landscape on the ground, where you can leave traces of memories, a series of rooms for ceremonial use or for pleasure and a floating roofscape with retreat rooms and hanging gardens changing colours with the seasons, it is a retreat, a place to reflect and after being re-energized, to celebrate.